How to Spot an Adbot in 3 Easy Steps!

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How to Spot an Adbot in 3 Easy Steps!

Postby Goomzi on Thu May 12, 2011 9:00 am

Well all the addition is good and also is great for having good entertainment with this recipe. It is my all time favorite and the recipe is also nice and i think there is no need of any more ingredient in it.
Goomzi
 
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Re: How to Spot an Adbot in 3 Easy Steps!

Postby JoH on Mon May 16, 2011 4:26 am

Goomzi wrote:Well all the addition is good and also is great for having good entertainment with this recipe. It is my all time favorite and the recipe is also nice and i think there is no need of any more ingredient in it.


This, Musclehackers, is an adbot posting.

"But Jo, how do we know it's an adbot?!"

Why, there are three easy steps!

1. Is the posting necro'd or otherwise inappropriate?
Adbots can't tell the difference between a post put up yesterday and one put up three years ago. Are there weeks or months between the last post and the new one? Does the response just make zero sense based on the thread? Then there's a good chance your poster is not a poster, but an adbot, and it found the form the way all adbots do - they do a metaserach called "crawling", by which they look for specific words or strings of words on forums, and then throw up a halfway garbage post with a link in the hopes someone thinks it's a person and clicks. They're not programmed to care about an appropriate response - only the click-through.

2. Is the language usage worse than could be reasonably expected from a limited-English speaker?
Limited-English speakers will make obvious syntactical and grammatical errors all over everywhere. English is a horribly messed up language, and we've all had the experience of the co-worker or neighbor who spoke it as their second language, so you probably know what I mean here. However, a limited-English speaker will still get a coherent thought expressed, however badly they may mallyhack the words used. Wrong forms of "to be", split infinitives, missing articles, incorrect or disagreeing tenses, these are all the things that we expect, but they don't destroy the meaning entirely.
It is my all time favorite and the recipe is also nice

This, however, is not a coherent thought. You would never, in any language, have a reason to convey this, ever. There's no syntactical or grammatical misuse, but you still see it and think "Wow, this guy's English is terrible!" because it's the frame of reference we're used to when confronted with a string of words that don't make sense. But the English is correct - it's the thought that's terrible, because there's no thinking, only a mindless adbot.

3. Is the signature a link?
Real people don't generally include sales links in their signatures - or at least not by themselves. These tend to be the kiss of death that YUP, it's an adbot. You'll see "Bay Area Personal Training", looks innocuous, right? And then it links out to HERE. (AVG doesn't hate it, so it's not going to spammify your PC I don't think, but click at your own risk.) If this were a personal trainer, sure, they'd have that link in every signature they use for every forum every where in the entire world. They'd also have some eye-catching statement - "Melt the pounds away in 12 weeks! {link}". They'd also speak with greater authority on the subject at hand, and their posts would make more sense. Generally, if the poster was a real person and just a limited-English speaker, you'd probably find them becoming HIGHLY fluent on subject matters they had professionally studied in English, or using words in their native tongue and then trying to convey the meaning by way of circumlocution if they studied it in their native language. Otherwise, the whole post was garbage barfed out by an adbot for the sake of another link placement.

All of that said, you may have a little box with an X to the left of the Report button (the upside down triangle with the !). This deletes posts. If you have said button, please for the love of our collective sanity, feel free to delete adbot posts whenever you may see them. The Announcements folder is a lost cause, but most of the place is pretty crap-free despite the dearth of real live admins (and no I am not one, I just have some admin functions for reasons I don't quite understand :lol:). If you can help keep it that way, please make liberal use of your little nuke button. And if you can't, well, at least you know what to look for if you're ever running your own forums, and you know better than to feed the adbots. ;)
JoH
 
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Re: How to Spot an Adbot in 3 Easy Steps!

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